1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and apparatus for telephone switching systems in a telecommunications network. In particular, but not exclusively, the invention relates to the generation of configuration data for use in the migration of telephone switching systems.
2. Description of the Related Technology
A major challenge when implementing the migration of an existing telephone switching system, such as a digital telephone switching system, to a new telephone switching system, such as a packet-based telephone switching system, is the task of accurately provisioning the mapping of telephone numbers to physical subscriber lines or channels. For analog lines that are directly connected to the digital telephone switching system, it may be possible to obtain electronic records of such mappings directly from the digital telephone switching system. Such records may be imported into the packet-based switching system by some automated means. However, for lines that are served by digital loop carrier systems, the relationship between analog ports on the digital telephone switching system and analog ports on a central office terminal part of the digital loop carrier system can typically only be recorded by manual means, and such records may be missing, out-of-date, or erroneous. It is a time-consuming and error-prone task to attempt to reconstruct such records, and even when compiled, the details would have to be entered manually into the provisioning interface for the packet-based telephone switching system, which itself is time-consuming and error-prone.
United States patent application no. US-A-2008/0159273 describes a system for facilitating migration from an analog network to a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) network. The system includes a migration broker for implementing line configuration changes from the analog network to the VoIP network on a line by line basis. When a line is to be migrated, a call is made to the migration broker, which interrogates the old switch for data associated with the currently configured line for which the call is being made. The migration broker then supplies the data from interrogation of the old switch to the new switch, and the line is then provisioned under the new switch instead of the old switch.
It would therefore be desirable to provide improved methods and apparatus for automatically generating configuration data for new switching systems in a telecommunications network, in particular when migrating over to a packet-based telephone switching system.